The Origins of Prison Slavery

Number 57 Winter 2018 4408 Market St., Ste. A, Oakland, CA 94608 Empowering our Captive Audience and Communities For Over Twenty Five Years LEARN THE TRUTH Unlike police brutality in the streets, THE ORIGINS cell phone cameras cannot be relied on OF PRISON SLAVery to expose brutality in California prisons. How Southern whites found replacements for Hear directly from the voices that California Department their emancipated slaves in the prison system. of Corrections does NOT want you to hear. By Shane Bauer Letters and articles of imprisoned or formerly imprisoned Published on October 2, 2018 at https://slate.com/news-and- * community members are denoted with an asterisk. politics/2018/10/origin-prison-slavery-shane-bauer-american- * prison-excerpt.html n August, an organization called the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee announced that prisoners in at least *PELICAN Bay PRISONERS' StateMENT I17 states had pledged to stage a strike to protest prison conditions. It is unclear how many inmates actually took part in the 19-day strike, ON 3RD ANNIVERSary OF ASHKER but organizers said “thousands“ refused to work, staged sit-ins, and turned away SETTLEMENT meals to demand “an immediate end to prison slavery.” Nationwide, inmates’ Posted by Center for Constitutional Rights on October 15, 2018 labor is essential to running prisons. They cook, clean, do laundry, cut hair, at https://ccrjustice.org/home/blog/2018/10/15/pelican-bay-prisoners-statement-3rd-anniversary- and fulfill numerous administrative tasks for cents on the dollar, if anything, settlement in hourly pay. Prisoners have been used to package Starbucks coffee and make unday marked the third anniversary of the landmark settlement agreement in Ashker v. California, lingerie. In California, inmates volunteer to fight the state’s wildfires for just $1 the class action lawsuit that ended indefinite solitary confinement in California prisons. We have an hour plus $2 per day. Saccomplished a lot in that time. Over 1600 prisoners who were looking at spending the rest of their The link between prison labor and slavery is not merely rhetorical. At the end lives in isolation have been released from Security Housing Units. Living conditions have improved for of the Civil War, the 13th amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment many prisoners. And prisoners who were prevented from seeking parole because they were isolated in SHU for a crime.” This opened the door for more than a century of forced labor that was have some prospect for release. in many ways identical to, and in some ways worse than, slavery. The following Most importantly, prisoners have continued to honor the historic 2012 Agreement to End Hostilities, is an excerpt from my new book, American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover working to resolve issues peacefully and prevent individual conflict from escalating into group conflict. Journey Into the Business of Punishment. The book details my time working Through this, we have dramatically reduced violence throughout California prisons and been able to undercover as a prison guard in a for-profit prison in Louisiana. It also traces harness our collective power to unite against our true opponent: a prison system that would rather punish the ways in which our prison system evolved out of the attempt of Southern and torture than rehabilitate. businessmen to keep slavery alive. However, much work remains. While prisoner culture has changed, CDCR culture has not. The California A few years after the Civil War ended, Samuel Lawrence James bought a prison system continues to obstruct meaningful reforms, to attempt to provoke violence by a variety of plantation on a sleepy bend of the Mississippi River in Louisiana’s West tactics such as integrating SNY informants into the GP, and to entrap individual prisoners. It continues to Feliciana Parish. It was known as Angola, named for the country of origin of violate our due process rights and resist systemic change. many of the people who were once enslaved there. Before the war, it produced Many prisoners released from SHU have been transferred into Level 4 prisons, which are essentially 3,100 bales of cotton a year, an amount few Southern plantations could rival. For modified SHUs. While called “general population,” prisoners in these units often receive as little out-of-cell most planters, those days seemed to be over. Without slaves, it was impossible to time as they did in the SHU, are denied jobs, and have little to no vocational and other programming. To reach those levels of production. honor the settlement, we need to live in true general population housing units that provide adequate social interaction, outdoor time, programming, work opportunities, and preparation for release. The link between prison labor and slavery is not Additionally, CDCR has done nothing to help us deal with the aftermath of years, and even decades, in merely rhetorical. At the end of the Civil War, the solitary confinement. As the report by the Stanford University Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Lab 13th amendment abolished slavery “except as a documents, the torture of solitary confinement does not end when the cell doors open. Many of us are still punishment for a crime.” suffering terribly. Some of us have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We can never get back the relationships with parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, spouses, kids, and other loved ones damaged by our years in But James was optimistic. Slavery may have been gone, but something like it isolation. We need rehabilitation and reparations. To begin to make us whole, CDCR must help us heal. was already beginning to come back in other states. While antebellum convicts Finally, CDCR continues to throw people back in the hole. It is relying on confidential information were mostly white, 7 out of 10 prisoners were now black. In Mississippi, regardless of whether the informant is credible or reliable. It even fabricates information and falsifies “Cotton King” Edmund Richardson convinced the state to lease him its convicts. documents. Prisoners continue to be denied fair hearings, and then are thrown back into solitary. This He wanted to rebuild the cotton empire he’d lost during the war, and, with its behavior is systemic throughout CDCR, from top to bottom. To honor the settlement agreement, we need penitentiary burned to ashes, the state needed somewhere to send its prisoners. independent oversight of CDCR’s disciplinary system and individual accountability for CDCR employees The state agreed to pay him $18,000 per year for their maintenance, and he who abuse their power. could keep the profits derived from their labor. With the help of convict labor, In a recent ruling, Judge Claudia Wilken has recognized that the settlement requires that reforms be he would become the most powerful cotton planter in the world, producing more meaningful, including that CDCR cannot simply shuffle people to “general population” units that function than 12,000 bales on 50 plantations per year. Georgia, whose penitentiary had like SHUs. And we are requesting an extension of the period of monitoring to ensure that CDCR complies been destroyed by Gen. Sherman, was leasing its convicts to a railroad builder. with the spirit and purpose of the settlement. Alabama had leased its convicts to a dummy firm that sublet them for forced Finally, we must continue to stick together, to honor the Agreement to End Hostilities, and to fight our labor in mines and railroad-construction camps throughout the state. true opponent: CDCR’s abuses. Our accomplishments thus far have come about because of our collective There was no reason Louisiana couldn’t take the same path. Black Americans power. Collective power is how we will achieve the goals ahead of us.● were flooding the penitentiary system, mostly on larceny convictions. In 1868, the state had appropriated three times as much money to run the penitentiary as it had the previous year. It was the perfect time to make a deal, but someone * PLIGHT OF THE PEOPLE beat James to it. A company called Huger and Jones won a lease for all of the Dear Prison Focus and Advocate Supporters, state prisoners. Barely had the ink dried on the contract before James bought watched and listened to Kanye [West] as he spoke at the White House and I am baffled by the them out for a staggering $100,000 (about $1.7 million in 2018 dollars). James soliloquy Kanye gave and I am attempting to understand what form of prison reform is being worked out a 21-year lease with the state, in which he would pay $5,000 the advocated for. first year, $6,000 the second, and so on up to $25,000 for the 21st year in I exchange for the use of all Louisiana convicts. All profits earned would be his. I am someone who is really being impacted by the criminal justice system and I fight daily for my freedom and for the chance to someday be back home with my family and loved ones. I express He immediately purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery to this with the hope that you and Kanye fully and truly understand that it is not a game. My fight for turn the state penitentiary into a three-story factory. One newspaper called it freedom, prison reform and criminal justice reform is a serious issue affecting hundreds of thousands, “the heaviest lot of machinery ever brought in the state.” The prison became if not millions of African American men and women who are stuck in prison with no readily available capable of producing 10,000 yards of cotton cloth, 350 molasses barrels, and resources for relief. So I appeal to you to inform yourself about the issues and the plight of the people 50,000 bricks per day.

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